Terms of service

What you may do with this site and the API, what we undertake to do, and the limits on both.

Last updated 12 September 2026

1. What this service is

opendata.bot collects information that UK public bodies already publish — Companies House, HM Revenue & Customs, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Intellectual Property Office, The Gazette, the Information Commissioner's Office and the consolidated sanctions lists — and presents it in one place, with an API over the same data.

We are not affiliated with any of those bodies, and nothing here is an official record. Where a decision matters, check the source register.

2. Using the site

You may read anything on the site, and link to it. You may not:

• scrape the site in bulk in place of the API, or work around rate limits;
• use the data to contact people at the addresses the registers publish for statutory correspondence — unsolicited marketing to an officer's registered address is a breach of PECR, and of these terms;
• present the data as your own official record, or as ours rather than the register's;
• attempt to identify or profile individuals beyond what the registers publish.

3. Accounts and API keys

An API key identifies your account and is yours to keep secret. Calls made with it are treated as yours, and usage is metered against it. Tell us at once if a key is exposed and we will replace it; a key you have lost control of can be revoked from your account area.

We may suspend a key that is being used to overload the service, to circumvent metering, or for anything in section 2. Where we do, we will say why.

4. Plans, credits and payment

Searching the register is free. Paid plans add a monthly allowance of company checks and, on Business, API access and a prepaid credit balance. What each plan includes is set out on the pricing page, which forms part of these terms.

Payments are processed by Stripe, which acts as merchant of record: Stripe is the seller in the transaction, issues the receipt and calculates, collects and remits any VAT or sales tax due. We provide the service the payment buys.

Credits are units of service, not money. They are not refundable, carry no cash value and cannot be transferred between accounts. Cancellation and refunds are dealt with in the refunds and cancellation policy.

5. The data, and what it is worth

Register data is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0 unless a page says otherwise. Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail and Office for National Statistics attributions appear wherever the postcode directory is used.

We present what the registers publish, including their errors, and we say on each figure when it was read. We cache responses, so a change made at the register this morning may not appear here until tonight. Nothing on this site is legal, financial, credit or compliance advice, and a name matching a sanctions list is not an identification of that person.

6. Availability

We aim to keep the service up and will tell you about planned work that affects it. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, and some of what we serve depends on upstream services we do not control — when a register is down or throttling us, the affected endpoint says so rather than inventing an answer.

7. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Subject to that, and to your rights as a consumer, our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to what you paid us in that period.

We are not liable for decisions taken on data that the source register published incorrectly, or for losses arising from use of the service for a purpose it is not fit for — credit decisions, statutory filings and regulatory screening among them.

8. Changes and ending

We may change these terms. Where a change materially affects a paid plan we will tell subscribers by email before it takes effect, and you may cancel. You can stop using the service at any time; see the refunds and cancellation policy for what happens to a subscription.

9. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.